At the Movies: RocknRolla

Rating:

Guy Ritchie is an idiot. He makes films about idiots, for idiots. They have no substance, they make no sense, they have no flair, no invention, no originality or interest in anything what so ever. Then he made Revolver, a film that tried to have all of the above, and it was just as bad, but at least I could laugh my way through that such was its incompetence. But of course, Revolver didn’t make any money, so he’s ditched any attempt at doing something different and gone back to the likes of Lock, Stock and Snatch that were an irritation of my adolescence way beyond spots and uncontrollable penises. In this film, he’s back to his worst. Congratulations Guy, you’ve now made the same terrible film three times.

The plot of RocknRolla is rather hard to decipher through the endless fast edits, stupid zooms and silly accents. Luckily through, the dialogue is so terrible that characters often sit in rooms explaining it to one another, so I did manage to work out a few things. Gerard Butler steals things from people with the help of Thandie Newton, who is the accountant to some Russian guy who lives in Wembley Stadium. Meanwhile, a rock singer fakes his death, takes a lot of drugs and a property developer kills people a lot, blissfully unaware it seems of the disastrous state of the housing market. Sorry I can’t go beyond that, but it was literally all I could work out. Oh yes, and there’s an awful subplot about a robber coming out to his mates which Guy clearly thinks is Brokeback Boozers or something, but whilst the Ang Lee film used understatement and emotional depth, this uses faggot jokes and a ‘hilarious’ (please note the quotation marks) scene of two guys slow-dancing.
Once again, the film is directed to an inch of its life, shots serve no purpose other than to look cool and one scene constantly blurrs into another with lots of spinning, freeframes and cock-ker-knee voice-overs. It jumps about all over the place and it is impossible to follow the vague pretensions of a narrative. Guy Ritchie definition of character development and thematic substance is to have his characters say the films title over and over again. All there is a vast collection of stuff happening. Two hours of stuff created with Guy Ritchie and his mates is enough to send me out in hives. The performances are all uniformidly awful. Thandie Newton’s got a new haircut, but she still cannot act in anything ever, so smokes a lot instead and tries to a do a look which she thinks is sexy and sassy but actually makes her look vaguely constipated. Toby Kebbell is incredibly irritating as a supposedly mad-philosophising crackhead. Gerard Butler, who can’t do accents at the best of times, seems to be struggling vastly here with his Scottish, which is odd because he’s actually from Scotland. Clearly, Guy Ritchie can even prevent people from speaking properly. Let this die please, let it float away and never be seen again because if you don’t, he’ll make it again.